Winning With a Helping of Grease and Sugar

For Louisville, which will play Wichita State Saturday in the NCAA tournament's Final Four, winning basketball games and earning the tournament's No. 1 overall seed has come a lot easier than meeting another challenge: sticking to a balanced diet. Or to be more specific, a diet that consists of something other than sugar, fat, grease and more sugar, fat and grease.

Cardinals guard Russ Smith, the tournament's leading scorer and odds-on favorite for Most Outstanding Player, is a loyal customer of Waffle House—where, he says, he likes to order a waffle, scrambled eggs with cheese, grits with sugar, two sausages and either "hot tea with three creams" or, if it's Sunday, a cup of coffee.

For lunch, Smith says he might order the cheesesteak melt with hash browns and fruit punch. "It's ridiculous how he performs with all that sugar," Louisville center Stephan Van Treese said.

Louisville trainer Fred Hina said Smith is in a category of his own, like he is on the court, "because he doesn't do anything fundamentally sound."

Given his 6-foot-6, 250-pound frame, forward Chane Behanan looks like the sort of kid who ate every last leaf of spinach on his dinner plate growing up. But during the basketball season, he says he's less likely to get his calories from vegetables than from another food group—one that includes honey buns, Apple Jacks, Frosted Flakes, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and, above all else, Cheetos. "It's like a wife," Behanan said of his junk food. "I'm married to her, and I can't break up with her, but sometimes I have to forget about her."

In fact, after the Cardinals beat Duke Sunday, the trophy they'd just won shared a table in the locker room with two bowls of fruit that didn't seem to have been touched. Next to the apples and oranges: pizza boxes and a nearly empty tray of cookies.

To be clear, Louisville doesn't allow its players to gorge on nothing but fast food. On a typical game day, the players are provided with a "potpourri of just about anything you'd want to eat" for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and a dinner spread of chicken, steak or fish, pasta, salad and vegetables, Hina said. "The guys are about as tired of spaghetti and chicken as they can be."

They're also given water and sports drinks—but never soda—while traveling on planes and buses. In fact, structuring a college athlete's diet is less complicated during the NCAA tournament because of the frequency of team meals, said Amy Bragg, president of the Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitians Association.

Anna Grout, Louisville's director of performance nutrition, is one of fewer than 50 registered dietitians working full-time in athletic departments, according to the CPSDA. Her trick to encourage Louisville's athletes to eat breakfast, she said, is advising them to prepare a sandwich the night before and "put your keys on top of it in the refrigerator so you don't forget it."

Proper hydration is just as important as nutrition. Louisville basketball players have been weighed before and after practice, Grout said, and they can sweat enough to fill their water bottles. A 2007 study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that basketball players between ages 17 and 28 made progressively fewer shots at increased levels of dehydration.

As the calendar turns to March and April, Louisville players attempt to swear off convenient restaurants like McDonald's and Qdoba, and visits to Waffle House drop from "two or three times a week" to once a month, said Louisville walk-on Jordan Bond. "We all know how bad Waffle House is for you—nothing disrespectful to Waffle House," he said.

They also listen to the team's resident nutrition nut, Cardinals center Gorgui Dieng, who was born in Senegal. "He actually eats pancakes without syrup," said Louisville forward Zach Price, who is fond of broccoli and asparagus.

Then again, college athletes don't have to obsess over watching their weight. Louisville's basketball players burn so many calories and have such high metabolisms that they possess a superpower everyone else craves: the ability to snack without repercussions. "You have a bunch of 18, 19 and 20 year olds," student-assistant coach Mike Marra said, "and they're going to eat what they want."

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